Julia > Julia's Quotes

“For some girls, our bodies are not immortal so much as
expendable, we have punished them or wearied
from dragging them around for so long and so we go

wearing the brilliant plumage of the possibly freed
by death.”
― Connie Voisine, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream

“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.”
― Dorothy Parker, Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker

“If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Maybe when she'd been eighteen it was a quality she might have laughed at, but at twenty-eight, dependability had turned into something of an aphrodisiac.”
― Jill Mansell, Rumour Has it

“For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone.
...
We leave you a tradition with a future.
The tender loving care of human beings will never become obsolete.
People even more than things have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.
Never throw out anybody.

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

Your “good old days” are still ahead of you, may you have many of them.”
― Sam Levenson, In One Era & Out the Other

“And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Offer it up personally,then. Right now. I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along. How do the survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business? From that place of meditation, I found the answer-you can finish the business yourself, from within yourself. It's not only possible, it's essential.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I am a girl ready to explode into nothing.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“The cruelest curse of the disease is also its most sacred promise: You will not feel this way forever.”
― Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

“The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever.”
― Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

“What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranthology

“A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind.”
― Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

“He remains kind, but a feeling nags at me, staying with me long after I leave. And it's this: It doesn't matter what I did to him. He can choose to remain detached, untouched by me. Something I can't do back.”
― Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

“I knew something else, too: It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.”
― Deb Caletti, He's Gone

“A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I wasn't sure how to answer. Could I tell him that one Secret of Adulthood is "Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense'"?”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
― Virginia Woolf

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something.”
― Nigel Davis, Evasion

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“The ironies of her ignorance were sometimes too hard to bear.”
― Rebecca Harrington, Penelope